Single-parent households often key to poverty, inequality

Angel Castro's son, Aaron, 3, watches a movie after his evening bath while Castro feeds his sister, Alexis, 17 months, dinner at their Englewood, Colo. apartment. Castro, 28, a single mother relying heavily on public assistance, quit her part-time job after losing childcare for the two children. Single parenthood is a bigger indicator of poverty than race, according to six decades of U.S. Census data analyzed by I-News Network. Combined as it often is with curtailed educational and employment opportunities, the rise of the single-parent family is a major factor in the widening disparities between blacks, Latinos and white state residents since the decades surrounding the civil rights movement. (Joe Mahoney/The iNews Network)

Get interactive

See a video for more information and a personal look at the troubles plaguing single-parent households.

Losing Ground series

I-News analyzed U.S. Census Bureau data from 1960 through 2010 to calculate the Latino, black and white demographics for high school and college graduation rates for adults 25 years and older, poverty of all people in each group, median family income and home ownership rates for households occupied by each group. Median family income was used as a measurement because median household income was not a category in 1960 and 1970.

For 1960 and 1970, I-News used the 1 percent Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) unweighted from the Minnesota Population Center website at the University of Minnesota. This allowed us to distinguish black numbers from the total non-white category used in the published Census tables. We also used the PUMs to retrieve poverty information for whites, not Latino. For several states, including some in New England and some in the Intermountain West, the black and Latino populations were very small in 1960 and 1970. There were major, self-acknowledged problems with the Census Bureau’s 1970 attempt to count Latinos. There was, for example, confusion in the Midwest and South over the Latino question that had many white residents mistakenly identifying as Latinos. In addition, residents in several Mideast states were only asked if they were from Puerto Rico. The PUMS data mitigated these problems, but did not eliminate them entirely.

Related Media

Angel Castro’s days teeter between determination and desperation. She is 28, impoverished, scarred from a chaotic childhood and adolescence, raising two young children alone.

She lives in a subsidized apartment in Englewood, scrambles to arrange child care that she can afford, and races to catch the bus to a part-time job that paid her $452 for one recent month.

To know the circumstances of Castro’s life is to understand something of the odds against her. Still, as she attends to her dark-haired, bright-eyed Aaron, 3, and Alexis, 17 months, she speaks with a voice that musters hope.

“I try to be the best mom I can,” she says. “I want to give my kids a chance at a healthy lifestyle. I want them to go to school, get good grades, be able to go to college and have a good future.”

» » »

In analyzing the widening gaps between minority groups and whites in Colorado on key measures of social progress, there are harsh realities behind the numbers. One is that among homes with children living in poverty, 68 percent are headed by just one parent, typically the mother.

Single parenthood is a bigger indicator of poverty than race, according to six decades of U.S. Census Bureau data analyzed by I-News Network. Combined as it often is with curtailed educational and employment opportunities, the rise of the single-parent family is a major factor in the widening disparities between blacks, Latinos and white state residents since the decades surrounding the civil rights movement.

The I-News analysis covered family income, poverty rates, high school and college graduation and homeownership as reported by the Census Bureau from 1960 to 2010. Health data and justice reports also were examined.

While the rate of single parenthood has increased among all races, its surge has been particularly dramatic among blacks. In Colorado, more than 50 percent of black households with young children are headed by a single parent, compared to 25 percent of white households. Among Latino households in the state with young children, 35 percent are headed by a single parent, according to the I-News analysis.

Those figures dovetail with the growing trend of births to single women. Nationally, 29 percent of white babies are born to unwed mothers, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while 53 percent of Latino babies and 73 percent of black babies are born to single mothers.

“When you talk with some of the older experienced folks of the civil rights movement, the one thing that we continue to come back to is the challenged family structure — African-Americans and Latinos — in the sense that back in the ‘60s the family structure was much more solid,” said Denver Mayor Michael Hancock. “There were more men in the house. There were less single women trying to raise children on their own.

“The family structure has disintegrated in a sense. That challenge is real.”

While many single parents raise thriving, productive children, the growing trend of fatherless homes has enormous implications for future generations. Children raised in female-headed homes in Colorado are four times more likely to live in poverty than those from married-couple homes, according to the I-News analysis. Other studies show they are less likely to go to college or even graduate high school.

Some link the absence of fathers in the home, in part, to the rising number of black and Latino men in prisons, often for drug crimes.

In 2010, about one in every 20 black men were incarcerated in Colorado state prisons compared to one out of every 50 Latino men and one of every 150 white men, according to an I-News analysis of government figures.

The state’s black and Latino incarceration rates are higher than the national averages, where disparities also exist, according to an analysis of Bureau of Justice reports. Nationally, one of every 33 black men and one of every 83 Latino men was behind bars in 2010. Colorado’s rate for white men was equivalent to the national figure, one in 150.

“The combination of the war on crack and mandatory sentencing saw a huge sweep of black males into prison and further degeneration of the black family,” said Theo Wilson, a district director for BarberShop Talk, a mentorship organization for men.

The Rev. Leon Kelly, who has worked with thousands of Denver’s at-risk inner city kids, believes intergenerational abandonment lies at the heart of the single-parenthood phenomenon.

“When you have some of these heads of household who are women, sometimes they feel like, ‘This is the norm. This is what I was raised with,’ ” Kelly said. “They’re so used to people coming in and out of their life. With their kids, their babies, it’s something that nobody can take away. Their kids are going to be there.”

Kelly said 80 percent of the youths he counsels live in female-headed households.

“A lot of them never had men on a consistent basis in the home to show them what they should be doing as far as being the head of the household,” Kelly said. “A lot of them join gangs because at least they’re able to find a sense of identity, a sense of acceptance. Now he’s not just a fatherless child.”

» » »

Both conservatives and liberals cite the impact of welfare programs on families as a major factor in the growing divide between the races, though for different reasons. Some said cutbacks in government support disproportionately hurt minorities, while others said the system encourages dependence on government and keeps minorities and the poor from improving their future.

Former United States Sen. Hank Brown said the welfare system rewards behavior that leads to poverty.

But former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb said welfare reform that passed under President Bill Clinton catapulted “a lot of people who were receiving government assistance off into a kind of a never-never land, which also then increased the number of disadvantaged that previously had been receiving assistance.”

This Gordian knot can be untangled, according to Isabel V. Sawhill and Ron Haskins, senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, the Washington, D.C., think tank. Their 2009 book called “Creating an Opportunity Society” advocates increased educational opportunities for children from pre-school on, encouraging and supporting work among adults and reducing the number of out-of-wedlock births while increasing the number of children raised by their married parents.

In an interview with I-News, Sawhill said the huge increase in single parenthood factors into the disparities between the races, particularly between blacks and whites.

“It’s one of the reasons why that gap has not narrowed, especially since the 1970s,” she said.

Sawhill and Haskins also have used Census data and simple modeling to simulate what would happen to poverty rates under different assumptions about work, marriage, education and family size among the poor. They found that the poverty rate could be reduced by about 70 percent if the poor completed high school, married, had no more than two children and worked full-time.

Sawhill told I-News that inequities will only end through a combination of personal responsibility and good government policy, including assistance for those who work. “We think it isn’t one or the other,” she said. “It’s both.”

» » »

For now, Angel Castro’s days revolve around trying to figure out how to feed and clothe Aaron and Alexis. She threw a small party a few months ago for Alexis’s first birthday and was relieved when she got gifts of diapers and wipes rather than toys.

She used to count herself lucky to have a neighbor who watched her children for $20 a week so that she could work. But Castro had to give up her position after her sitter got a better-paying job.

Castro is frustrated by the endless rules and paperwork of a welfare system she believes is “built to set you up for failure.” She said she has only four hours per day of government-supported child care, which means she can’t work full-time.

She sometimes thinks the only solution is to put Aaron and Alexis in foster care and hope for a better fate for them than she experienced.

For more information: inewsnetwork.org. Contact Ann Carnahan Espinola at aespinola@inewsnetwork.org. I-News intern Leia Larsen contributed to this report, which was made possible, in part, by grants from The Colorado Health Foundation and the French-American Foundation.

We’ve got a problem in the community, and every indicator that you can attribute to fatherless or broken homes, every negative thing — high dropout rates, incarceration, premature death related to violence — all those things, there’s a connection with kids being born to fractured families. — Christelyn D. Karazin, founder of the “No Wedding, No Womb!” online initiative that seeks to address the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks